Writing the History of the Mind: philosophy and science in France 1900-1960

二十世纪上半叶，相当数量的法国知识分子把心灵作为他们研究的主要对象。传统上，对心灵及其极限和能力的研究是哲学的领域。然而，在20世纪的头几十年，新兴学科的实践者与哲学家之间的竞争越来越激烈：民族学家、社会学家、心理学家和科学史学家都声称要研究人们是如何思考的。哲学史学家、巴黎民族学研究所创始人卢西安·利维-布鲁尔向欧洲读者“解释了当地人的想法”，并为“心态”一词赋予了科学价值，这一术语迅速传播到其他社会科学以及科学史、哲学和历史学。科学史学家在分析科学的各个历史阶段时，使用了心理这个概念。通过展示过去的学者与现代人有着不同的目标、世界观和价值观，他们抨击了将现代科学概念和价值观投射到过去文本上的非常普遍的不合时宜的态度。一些哲学家改变了他们研究心灵的方式：他们抛弃了抽象的反思，转而对哲学文本进行经验分析。他们的审查旨在了解这些文本的作者是如何推理的。他们把通过文本对心灵的分析称为哲学的“实验方法”。他们中的一些人，如哲学史学家利昂·布伦施维希，他认为心灵随着时间的变化而变化，目的是写一部“心灵的历史”，这是一部人类发展现代理性的历史。一些哲学家，包括布伦施维希的学生巴什拉，转向科学史，因为在他们看来，科学显示了人类理性的最高点。科学史学家不得不努力为他们的学科创造空间，并授予他们学术声望，而哲学等更传统学科的一些从业者有时担心他们认为的空间被侵蚀。通过特别关注哲学史和科学史的历史学家，我展示了这些学者对心灵和历史的不同观点，他们对更传统的或更新的学科的承诺，以及他们不同的家庭背景和社会地位之间的联系。学者联盟在学术界--特别是巴黎大学内部--和它之外，例如在独立机构和政党(例如人民阵线的政党)中都被考虑。我展示了这些知识分子的思想和议程是如何与他们的社会和制度地位不可分割地联系在一起的。这项研究将影响我们理解那个时期知识生活的方式，克服目前学术的碎片化，未能重建学者和有关思想之间的历史联系，因为这些已经被不同的学科所挪用。最重要的是，它显示了学科之间的联系，他们的机构空间，他们从业者的社会地位，以及关于历史和思想的想法。它还解释了现代法国哲学和认识论的历史根源，以及它们与英美同行的差异。它还旨在促进关于哲学史和科学史应该如何书写以及过去的文本应该如何解释和使用的辩论。所讨论的一些问题可能有助于当前关于多元文化主义和不同价值体系之间关系的讨论。

In the first half of the twentieth century, a remarkable number of French intellectuals indicated the mind as the main object of their research. Traditionally, the study of the mind and of its limits and capabilities was the domain of philosophy. However, in the first decades of the twentieth century, practitioners of emergent new disciplines were increasingly competing with philosophers: ethnologists, sociologists, psychologists and historians of science were all claiming to study'how people think'. The historian of philosophy, and founder of the Paris institute d'Ethnologie, Lucien Levy-Bruhl 'explained' to European readers 'how natives think' and gave scientific currency to the term 'mentality', which quickly spread to the other social sciences, and to history of science, philosophy and history. The historians of science employed the concept of mentality when analysing the various historical stages of the sciences. By showing that past scholars had different goals, world-views and values from those of modern people, they attacked the all-too-common anachronistic attitude of projecting modern scientific concepts and values onto past texts. Some philosophers changed the way in which they studied the mind: they discarded abstract reflection in favour of an empirical analysis of philosophical texts. Their examination was aimed at understanding how the authors of these texts reasoned. They called their analysis of the mind through texts the 'experimental method' of philosophy. Those among them, such as the historian of philosophy Leon Brunschvicg, who believed that the mind changes in time, aimed to write a 'history of the mind', that is a history of the ways in which human beings have developed their modern rationality. Some philosophers, including Brunschvicg's student Bachelard, turned to history of science, for in their view science showed the highest points of human rationality. Historians of science had to struggle to create spaces for their disciplines and confer on them academic prestige, while some practitioners of more traditional disciplines such as philosophy sometimes feared what they saw as an erosion of their spaces. By focusing in particular on historians of philosophy and history of science, I show the connections between these scholars' different views of the mind and of history, their commitment either to more traditional or to newer disciplines, and their different family backgrounds, and social positions. The scholars' alliances are considered both within academia I the University of Paris in particular- and outside it, for instance in independent institutes and political parties, (e.g. the parties of the Popular Front). I show how these intellectuals' ideas and agendas were indissolubly linked with their social and institutional positions.This study will impact on the way we understand the intellectual life of the period, overcoming the fragmentation of current scholarship that has failed to reconstruct the historical links between the scholars and ideas in question, as these have been appropriated by different disciplines. Crucially, it shows the connection between disciplines, their institutional spaces, social positions of their practitioners, and ideas about history and the mind. It also explains the historical roots of modern French philosophy and epistemology, and their differences with their Anglo-American counterparts. It is also aimed to contribute to the debates about how history of philosophy and history of science should be written, and about the way in which past texts should be interpreted and used. Some of the issues discussed may contribute to current discussions of multiculturalism and relationships between different value systems.